Went to Chapters (Big Canadian Bookstore) after work yesterday. After reading the Carlin book my love for literature has been rekindled. I bought myself a membership card so I get 10 percent off each purchase and I picked up a couple books:

Got some good deals on them too and they both work well as light reading at work.

Really looking forward to The Pale King in 2011 though:
“The subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it’s all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity.”

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman: Pullman (famous for his His Dark Materials children’s series) will once again be courting controversy with this new book. According to The Guardian, “The book will provide a new account of the life of Jesus, challenging the gospels and arguing that the version in the New Testament was shaped by the apostle Paul."

Kind of embarassed to admit that I read the entire book, but I made a deal with my younger 10 year old sister. She has to read a couple of books for school and I got her to read the City of Bones by Classandra Clary...She said she'd finish it if I read the whole thing with her.

It's considered "Young Adult" and Urban/Science Fiction Fantasy. It's like a mix of Harry Potter, the Ergaon series, and a some Twilight all in one. I bitterly despise Twilight and refuse to see or read the series, but because I have some sort of weird obsession with finishing books I've started, I am going to read the next 2 books in the Clary - Mortal Instruments series...City of Glass, and City of Ashes.

Decently interesting if you into that kind of genre, but definitely deserves the teen reading level it has. Uhhhh.

Finished The Windup Girl last week. Really interesting book. Very interesting story. There wasn't much that has really stuck with me, but it did live up to it's billing as being one of the better books to come out in it's genre last year.

Currently reading Nova Swing by M. John Harrison. It's kind of a mess. There's good in there, but the book makes very, very, very little sense for pages and pages at a time. You have a pretty good idea about what's going on in the book, but it would be sooo much better if there was a bit more clarity. Haze as a literary device is nice, but not this much. Still, the writing is good.

How are you liking Book of the New Sun Paranoidmoonduck? I enjoyed that one. Never finished it. Had some bad reading habits at the time so I put it down for an extended period of time and just never finished it. But Gene Wolfe is really good.

How are you liking Book of the New Sun Paranoidmoonduck? I enjoyed that one. Never finished it. Had some bad reading habits at the time so I put it down for an extended period of time and just never finished it. But Gene Wolfe is really good.

I'm not sure how I feel about his storytelling or his characters. I'm barely out of the first quarter of the book though, so I need more perspective. The prose, however, is ************* fantastic. This is the first thing I've ever read by Wolfe, but I've been really impressed. It's really rare you find science fiction or fantasy that reads like this book does (some early Neal Stephenson...maybe).

So I know someone mentioned the movie in the movie thread, but has anyone read The Road?

It's really weird because I saw it in a store and wanted to get it, and then later that day someone mentioned the movie on here. Anyways, it looks interesting and has gotten a lot of good reviews. Plus, I like "post apocalyptic" themes.

So I know someone mentioned the movie in the movie thread, but has anyone read The Road?

It's really weird because I saw it in a store and wanted to get it, and then later that day someone mentioned the movie on here. Anyways, it looks interesting and has gotten a lot of good reviews. Plus, I like "post apocalyptic" themes.

The novel is excellent, better than the movie in my opinion...The movie definitely does the bleak and hopeless feelings of the book justice, but you can never really beat the original thing.

The complete and utter hopefullness of the man and boy's situation is instantly felt from the beginning, and you can't help but root for their survival. The movie portrays it well, except for leaving a few things out like a dead baby's head stuck on a spike.

This is an excerpt from an EW.com review with a few quotes from the book that describes the entire story in a paragraph. It grabs you right away.

Quote:

''The frailty of everything revealed at last,'' the man thinks. And with that frailty, so its forever-lost beauty, which torments him daily: the pinholes in a mantel that once held Christmas stockings; the ''quaint concerns'' in a salvaged newspaper; the memory of the theater where he once heard music with his wife. By night, he dreams of the old earth; by day, he and the boy struggle onward through the ash, repetitively asking and answering the same few primal questions: Are we still the good guys (the man in fact may no longer be)? What, if anything, do we owe our fellow creatures? Are we going to die? Would we be better off dead? To this last one, the boy's mother answered with suicide, announcing to the man, ''I am done with my own whorish heart.''

With the whole Late Night/NBC fiasco going on right now and if your even mildly interested in guys like Leno, David Letterman, and Andy Kaufman and where they started, it's worth reading. The book focuses on the Comedy Strike of 1979 and takes you into the lives of many of the up and coming comedians of the time. I loved it...But it made me hate Jay Leno even more.